Alphonse Daudet, 1840-1897

Biographical note

French author.

In 1866, Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from My Windmill), written in Clamart, near Paris, and
alluding to a windmill in Fontvieille, Provence, won the attention of many readers. The first of his longer books,
Le petit chose (1868), did not, however, produce popular sensation. It is, in the main, the story of his own
earlier years told with much grace and pathos. The year 1872 brought the famous Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin
de Tarascon, and the three-act play L'Arlésienne. But Fromont jeune et Risler aîné (1874) at
once took the world by storm. It struck a note, not new certainly in English literature, but comparatively new in
French. His creativeness resulted in characters that were real and also typical.

Jack, a novel about an illegitimate child, a martyr to his mother's selfishness, which followed in 1876,
served only to deepen the same impression. Henceforward his career was that of a successful man of letters, mainly
spent writing novels: Le Nabab (1877), Les Rois en exil (1879), Numa Roumestan (1881),
Sapho (1884), L'Immortel (1888), and writing for the stage: reminiscing in Trente ans de
Paris (1887) and Souvenirs d'un homme de lettres (1888). These, with the three Tartarins - Tartarin
de Tarascon, Tartarin sur les Alpes, Port-Tarascon - and the short stories, written for the most
part before he had acquired fame and fortune, constitute his life work.